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Looking towards Mountain View to provide a suite of digital tools for your new business? Make sure to pen per-user costs into your ledger — Google Apps isn’t free anymore. According to Google’s enterprise blog, the basic Google Apps package is being abandoned to streamline the service, offering businesses a single, $50 per user option that promises 24/7 phone support, 25GB inboxes and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Pre-existing free customers can still hum along unmolested, of course, and the standard pricing doesn’t apply to schools or universities, either. Personal Google accounts are still free too, doling out gratis Gmail and Drive access to anyone with a unique user name. The team hopes that streamlining the Apps will allow it to provide better service, possibly offering enterprise users new features on a faster timetable.

Google has just snapped up BufferBox, a Waterloo, Ontario-based startup that offers temporary lockers for online purchases much like the ones recently deployed by Amazon. Instead of 7-Elevens and RadioShacks however, the relatively young startup has only just started a deal to install parcel kiosks in Canada’s Metrolinx GO Transit stations. The Mountain View company hopes to keep BufferBox alive through the acquisition, with plans for 100 kiosks in Greater Toronto and Hamilton in the next year. Of course, we can’t help but think this could all be part of Google’s master plan for a rumored same-day delivery service that might make Amazon a touch nervous. Hopefully this means future Nexus deliveries will be a just little faster, eh?

Intel isn’t having much success keeping its upcoming Bay Trail-era Atom platform under wraps. If the previous overview leak wasn’t enough, a roadmap uncovered by Mobile Geeks has just explored the finer points of the tablet-oriented Bay View-T and its Valleyview-T processors. The most surprising leap may be in graphics: while we knew the GPU core would be much faster, we’re now seeing that the new Intel hardware can output to as much as a 2,560 x 1,600 display and record stereoscopic, 1080p 3D video in the event that 3D-capable tablets come back into vogue. Likewise, battery life should be rosier than you’d expect; Bay Trail-T can reach the same performance at half the power, which should lead to about two extra hours of video playback for at least some of the 1.6GHz to 2.1GHz processors in the lineup. Don’t get too excited by the potential, however. If the leak is accurate, Bay Trail for tablets isn’t expected until early 2014, by which point 22-nanometer Atoms will be a step behind the cutting edge.

Google has revealed just how it harnesses your idle curiosity on every subject imaginable to supercharge its voice search. A database of 230 billion googled words was fed into a language model that can then work out the probability of what you’re going to say next. Mountain View researcher Ciprian Chelba explained that one example of this is if you say “New York,” you’re statistically more likely to say “Pizza” than “Granola,” regardless of any new year’s resolutions. If you’d like to learn more, you can find the algebra-packed original paper down at the source link.

Ever wonder how Google can make such grandiose claims for the sheer amount of Street View imagery it collects? Here’s how. Google’s Masrur Odinaev has posted a snapshot of a central mapping car parking lot that shows dozens of the camera-equipped Subaru Imprezas amassed ahead of future runs. While it already represents more Street View cars in one place than anyone outside of Google would normally ever see, what’s most impressive is remembering that this addresses just a portion of the entire vehicle mix — aside from the local cars you don’t see in the photo, there are extra units worldwide providing street-level coverage alongside tricycles and underwater expeditions. Odinaev’s look reminds us just how much effort is needed to make Street View a common feature — and that there are are legions of Google staffers whose low-profile work goes a long way towards making our navigation easier.

That means you can now access Street View on your iPhone by opening Google Maps in the Safari browser. Just head to maps.google.com, enter an address, and tap the “pegman” icon to enter Street View.

Since Google Maps is no longer baked into Apple’s Maps app for iPhones and iPads, using the web-based version is your best option. Google is said to be working on a standalone Google Maps app for the iPhone, but it probably won’t be ready for a few months.

Some of the world’s most beautiful and historic places are in some of the most difficult to visit locations. If globetrekking isn’t in your budget, take a desktop vacation instead with the Google World Wonders Project and view beautiful places like the Toshodai-ji Temple in Japan, the Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew in the UK, or the old town of Ouro Preto in Brazil.

The World Wonders Project uses Google’s Street View technology to take you on virtual tours of some of the world’s most historically significant places. With destinations in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, you can browse areas of interest by selecting a continent or a theme from the menus at the top of the page, by clicking through the photo carousel in the center, or even by clicking and dragging the globe at the bottom until you see something you like. Then, just click “explore this site now” to take a Street View-powered walking tour.

The links on the right side of the page will give you more information about the location, related videos and other walkthroughs, and even photos and 3D models of the location so you can see more detail. It’s definitely not as good as going and experiencing some of these beautiful places on your own, but if you’re stuck at your desk, it may be the next best thing. Best of all, if you have a Panoramio account, you can even contribute some of your own photos, if you ever do visit.

Hit the link below to give it a try, and check out this related video for a fun behind the scenes look at how all of these images were captured. Have you been to any of these places yourself, or did we inspire you to pack your bags? Let us know where you’ve been in the comments below.

Google has already been taking us to exoticlocations through Street View, but now it’s hoping to enshrine the most famous places on Earth through the World Wonders Project, one car (or trike) at a time. A total of 132 sites, ranging from natural landmarks like Yosemite to much more synthetic constructions like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, have both an on-the-ground view as well as 3D renderings, videos and loads of history from UNESCO and the World Monuments Fund, among others. The educational bent is so conspicuous that Google is offering up some of the content in downloadable bundles for schools along with the usual web-based look. All of it promises a much more fascinating, hands-on approach than a dry textbook, and it’s a unique way of bringing encyclopedic knowledge to an era of Chromebooks and the cloud.

Google’s changing its search algorithm to punish sites that emphasize search-engine optimization over quality. Mountain View’s data centers will exclude sites that offer no useful content, have articles written in keyword-sprinkled gibberish or only link to sites within a cluster. If the computers find it, the site’s pagerank will be demoted, with the company expecting to affect around three percent of all English language queries when it goes live later this week. The company isn’t providing more details (lest it help those trying to game the system), so just get all of those gratuitous Justin Bieber references out of your system before Friday, okay?

Chrome users are in store for a bundle of printing perks today courtesy of a recent update to Google Cloud Print. In addition to wirelessly sending documents to nearby printers, Mountain View’s now adding FedEx to the drop down destination list, granting users the ability to obtain retrieval codes for use at any of that shipping service’s locations across the U.S. The remote printing feature has also gained an additional device partner, enlisting Canon into the ranks of participating companies, occupied by the likes of Epson, Kodak and HP. And as an extra bonus for the Android faithful, handsets and tablets sporting the search giant’s Ice Cream Sandwich OS will now be able to receive and display transmitted docs as PDFs, although you’ll need to install the beta version of the company’s mobile browser to take advantage of this seamless integration. Open OS, meet the closed-off cloud.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.